I originally moved my domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap because of great prices and no-nonsense renewal process. So why go through effort of moving your domain from NameCheap to Route 53, and potentially having to setup separate DNS hosting account only to save $1.75 per year?

Automation. NameCheap’s API is not very good for managing large number of records. Cloudflare and Route 53 APIs are, and they are also very well supported by Infrastructure as Code tools like Ansible and Terraform.

Advanced DNS features. If you’re managing a more complex cloud infrastructure, you might want to pay a bit more for hosted zone and gain additional Route 53 features, like DNS routing policies, health checks and failover.

Portability. Surprisingly, transferring domains from NameCheap took more effort than from GoDaddy! I had to open a support ticket to export my zone files, and NameCheap confirmation emails and docs implied that it takes 5 days for domain transfer to complete, while in reality it can be done on the same day.

Price. $1.75 could add up to a sizeable amount when you have multiple domain names.

Better security. NameCheap supports only SMS-based MFA, which is easy to intercept and therefore insecure. I don’t know why NameCheap still hasn’t added support for software tokens like Google Authenticator or Authy.